The Landscape of Sexuality in Victorian Literature: Erotic Fantasy in Underground Publications
As a literary researcher, the complexities of gender and sexuality have always fascinated me, as the binaries that dictate the concepts of man and woman, heterosexuality and homosexuality, and femininity and masculinity have all been reshaped and molded to social and cultural expectations but never inherently broken. The Victorians, in my opinion, are one of the most interesting societies to study in juxtaposition to the concepts of gender and sexuality, as the period was fraught with tension between self-expression and socially induced sterility. In my time studying Victorian literature, I have come across countless pieces of scholarship on why authors cast the roles of gender and sexuality in the way they did, though I have distinctly come back to the Revisionists time and time again. Though the Revisionists certainly put forth very interesting concepts — much of which I continue to evidence in my research — I have always found it difficult to fully accept the argued idea of a sexual awakening in a period that was so heavily sterilized. Though there was certainly evidence of an overarching awakening of the self, the social and ethical expectations of both men and women were far too limiting to accurately conceptualize what the Victorians were experiencing regarding their understanding of sexuality and gender expression.
In my opinion, while sex and sexuality were indeed explored more in-depth in the literature of the time, the social expectations of masculinity and femininity still guided the erotic and sexual expression of both men and women. Most pointedly, sexual expression and erotic fantasy were still policed by an anti-pleasure mentality that seeped from overarching ideals of patriarchal anxiety, thus affecting how authors allowed their characters to perform gender, sexuality, and physical gratification. In my varied attempts to deconstruct the intent and influence behind sexual expression in Victorian literature, I found myself wondering where authors were breaking the rules, because in my view, if what was printed in mainstream media was deemed appropriate for general consumption, there had to be a market for the inappropriate, but what was being written and where was it being published.
The Pearl: A Fusion of Fear and Erotic Expression
In researching more unhinged examples of sexual fantasy and desire in the vast catalogs of Victorian literature, I found myself stumbling across one of the most notorious publications of erotic literature printed during the period. The Pearl: A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading emerged on the underground London market in 1879 and published a total of 18 volumes, including a Christmas annual, until suddenly disappearing around 1880. Before being shut down due to its inappropriate content, the pornographic magazine printed obscene collections of erotic tales, rhymes, parodies, and poems of graphic sexual context and obscenity. Though very little is known about the contributors, readers, or original circulation of The Pearl, scholars do know that it was one of many erotic magazines that flourished in Victorian London. One known aspect of The Pearl was its publisher, William Lazenby, who would later come to publish The Oyster and The Boudoir, which replaced The Pearl upon its subsequent demise. In taking its taboo subject matter in juxtaposition to the more sterilized presentations of desire and physical gratification in mainstream print, The Pearl offered me the perfect opportunity to deconstruct the intent and influence behind sexuality and eroticism in Victorian literature, as its underground nature allowed for inhibitions to run unchecked and the inappropriate to flourish — which is exactly what I was hoping to find.
While my research into The Pearl centered on a shifting focal point of gender performance and sexual expression, I found the magazine’s content to be largely structured around anxiety-driven attempts to experience unauthorized erotic gratification. Through said attempts, the language utilized by the anonymous writers was predominantly spoken through the lens of a heterosexual male and displayed over-ripened undertones of hyper-masculinity. As many scholars have touched on in their own investigations of The Pearl, I believe that the themes of subjugation and degradation were uncensored reactions to the Victorian males’ overarching fear of two interconnected thoughts: 1) the evolving binary of femininity and 2) the over-inflated expectations concerning patriarchal masculinity. As such, the over-feminization of both women and objects within The Pearl’s diverse portfolio is indicative of the Victorian male’s attempt to ease the discontent they felt about their own masculinity and, in turn, their relationship with women and femininity.
Sub-Umbra: Controlling Landscapes and Scenery with Hypermasculinity
Though much of the male discontent mentioned above can be identified in nearly every written piece of literature in The Pearl, I found Sub-Umbra, one of the six recurring novels in the magazine, to be one of the most fruitful examples, as it demonstrates several ways in which the Victorian male internalized and enacted sociological models of masculinity. Particularly, it is the male’s enactment that fortifies the notion that the over-sexualization of femininity in erotic literature was simply an outlet to express the fear and anxiety over one’s own gender performance. In the context of Sub-Umbra, nineteen-year-old Walter, the main character and narrator, recounts his highly erotic dalliances in and around his uncle’s countryside residence in Sussex, with a recurring focus on his conquests within the country landscape and gardens. While it seems irrelevant to most, Walter’s fixation on the natural scenery during his exploits is highly pertinent to the enactment of his masculinity, as the landscape itself is not only sexualized in his narrative account but highly feminized as well. One of the most interesting examples of this phenomenon was Walter’s description of the sandpit:
“It so happened that there was an old sand pit close by, in which several years before Master Frank had amused himself by making a Robinson Crusoe’s cave, and planted bushes in front of it, so that the entrance was perfectly out of sight, and no one would fancy anyone could be screened by the small amount of cover which seemed to grow on the side of the pit, this was just the place for our purpose, and it had been beforehand arranged that we were not to be found for a long time. Gliding into the cave Frank let fall the old curtain that hung at the entrance, and we were at once in the dark, the place was large enough for us all to sit together on a heap of fine soft sand at the further end.” (The Pearl: A Journal of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading, Issues 7–12)
In Walter’s narration, the sexualized image of a woman is subsequently born from the language used to describe the sandpit, as his personification of the location’s purpose and physical qualities parallels that of prescribed sociological femininity as well as a woman’s physical purpose in juxtaposition to her male counterpart. In short, the sandpit was a place of pleasure, and the hypermasculine illusion of the sexualized environment is a hyper-masculine mode of control utilized by the male narrator to gain authority and power over what he deemed controllable, thus inflating his own masculinity: “On the one hand, feminized space is passively looked at and brings visual pleasure to the young man; on the other hand, he looks at it in an active, empowering, controlling and erotic — in Lacanian terms, scopophilic — way.” (Virdis 111)
Bifurcating Sexuality: Normative and Deviant Identities
In studying complex texts such as Sub-Umbra, I have found that demystifying the expression of Victorian sexuality and eroticism is not as simple as some scholars and theorists have led us to believe. Most pointedly, I would argue that the Victorians may be one of the most difficult groups to study, as mid-century beliefs around sex and gender were still heavily policed by anti-pleasure mentality and social sterility, thus complicating the binaries in which modern scholars, such as myself, are so familiar with. Subsequently, while some researchers read Sub-Umbra — as well as other pieces in The Pearl — as a simple-minded expression of hypermasculine eroticism, the codings of fear and anxiety go much deeper than the words on the page, thus affecting the overarching performances of masculinity and femininity within. As Ellen Bayuk Rosenman asserts in Unauthorized Pleasure: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience, gender expression, especially masculinity, required rigorous policing, as Victorian males were required to display “virtuoso asceticism,” which, as Rosenman cites, is “a gender and class performance that visibly repudiated sensual appetites and affirmed corporeal defenses.” (Rosenman 8).
This concept of virtuoso asceticism was very eye-opening for me when taken into juxtaposition to my overarching analysis of Sub-Umbra, as Walter’s hyper-masculine behavior takes on a new light. In looking at the sexual ideologies that Walter faced, his choice in gender performance is highly indicative of a man who felt both fearful of and pressured by the social expectations of masculinity forced upon him by both his peers and authority figures. In short, Walter’s over-sexualization and, subsequently, subjugation of both women and his surroundings could be interpreted as an anxiety-driven expression of masculinity, as his inherent need to display his dominance was not a personal one but rather something that he felt compelled to do to secure his place in society as a valid heterosexual male.
Social Boundaries: Demystifying Channels of Expression
Though we will never fully understand the intent or meaning behind The Pearl and its anonymous publications, I believe the types of self-expression found within to be highly indicative of the Victorians’ attempts to create new channels of expression while fortifying their own sexual identities. Moreover, complex works such as Sub-Umbra could prove to be highly useful in continuing to understand nineteenth-century binaries of masculinity and femininity, as the tensions between social expectation and gender performance are told through the taboo fantasies of highly repressed men and women, giving scholars a unique lens into the unsterilized psyche of the Victorian writer and reader.
As someone who has intensively researched ideologies surrounding gender and sexuality across several periods and genres, The Pearl has been one of the most fruitful pieces of literature I have read thus far, as it effectively breaks through the veil that separates socially-appropriate literature and taboo erotica. In my opinion, The Pearl opens the proverbial door to witnessing unchecked behaviors and desires that were largely suppressed and hidden deep within the self, creating a unique lens for researchers like myself to better understand the value of erotic fiction in juxtaposition to demystifying archaic and modern binaries of sex and gender.
Works Cited
Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience. Cornell University Press, 2003.
“The Pearl: A Journal of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading, Issues 7–12.” Internet Archive, 1 Jan. 1880, archive.org/details/pearl_7–12/mode/2up.
Virdis, Daniela Francesca. “Sexualised Landscapes and Gentry Masculinity in Victorian Scenery: An Ecostylistic Examination of a Pornographic Novel from the Magazine The Pearl.” Journal of Literary Semantics, vol. 48, no. 2, 2019, pp. 109–28.